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Museums—Why Are They Worth a Visit?Awake!—2005 | March 8
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The Most American of the Museums
This latest in the Smithsonian collection of museums commemorates the early inhabitants of the Americas—the more than 500 Native American tribes that occupied this land before Europeans or Africans ever set foot here. It is the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), located on the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum. It was inaugurated on September 21, 2004. The museum is easily identified by its unique curvilinear design. The 250,000-square-foot [23,000 sq m] building has an exterior covering of Kasota limestone from Minnesota. It gives the appearance of “a stratified stone mass that has been carved by wind and water.”
What can you expect to find in it? The five major inaugural exhibitions “feature approximately 7,000 objects from the world-renowned NMAI collection of some 800,000 ethnographic and archaeological objects.” (Insight, the Smithsonian newsletter) There are baskets, pottery, and beadwork representing tribes as far apart as the Mapuche in Chile, the Quechua in Peru, the Lakota in the United States, and the Anishinabe in Canada.
In the words of W. Richard West, Jr., who is Southern Cheyenne and the founding director of the museum, its purpose is to “correct misconceptions and help bring about a better understanding of the lives and cultures of the Native peoples of this hemisphere by all peoples, Native and non-Native alike.” It takes about two hours to visit this American Indian collection.
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Museums—Why Are They Worth a Visit?Awake!—2005 | March 8
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[Picture on page 18]
The National Museum of the American Indian has a unique curvilinear design
[Credit Line]
Photo by Robert C. Lautman
[Picture on page 18]
A blown-glass vase by a modern American Indian artist
[Credit Line]
Photo by Ernest Amoroso, © Smithsonian Institution/National Museum of the American Indian
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